The present invention relates exclusively to the field of processing mail, and it relates more particularly to apparatus for providing assistance in manually sorting articles of mail as performed by an operator in business premises devoted specifically to handling mail.
At present, mail is sorted in business or industrial enterprises and in public authorities by a process that is essentially manual. When mail is received by the business, the operator having the task of sorting the mail takes articles of mail one by one, identifies the destination person or service and, possibly after opening the article of mail, places it in a pigeonhole corresponding to said person or service. It is clear that such an entirely manual process is lengthy and suffers from very low productivity. Productivity is particularly low when the number of pigeonholes is large, and when the services of the business are being constantly reorganized, and also depends on whether the people performing the task do it regularly or only on a temporary basis (e.g. during a holiday period when a colleague or a trainee is replacing the usual operator). In similar manner, the same manual sorting method can be used for mail leaving the business on its way to the postal authorities, for the purpose of satisfying the requirements thereof.
American patent U.S. Pat. No. 4,181,948 discloses a system of assisting manual sorting for the purpose of increasing the productivity of this type of task. For this purpose, a unit is proposed that has a determined, but quite small, number of pigeonholes (fifteen to up to eighteen in the example shown), which unit is designed to be placed on a workbench like a piece of office equipment (see FIG. 4 of that patent). The unit is fully prewired with a power supply and a set of indicators allocated to each of its pigeonholes. These indicators are driven from a PC type computer which is connected to the unit via a conventional serial computer link, and they are actuated as a function of data input at the keyboard of the computer by the operator of the sorting service concerned (specifically a company code when sorting air tickets).
Unfortunately, the solution proposed by that American patent still suffers from numerous drawbacks. Firstly, it requires the operator to input certain items of information manually (when sorting mail, that would be the destination of the article of mail); in addition to the loss of productivity that this operation causes, it is also a source of error. Thereafter, it assumes that traditional pigeonholes or any other storage systems presently available in businesses should be replaced by the proposed unit. Finally, it would appear to be difficult to implement for small- and medium-sized enterprises, i.e. for enterprises having no more than about one hundred people (and thus in practice fewer than fifty potential destinations for mail).
An object of the present invention is to remedy the above drawbacks by proposing apparatus that enables very significant improvements in productivity to be obtained with manual sorting throughput being multiplied by a factor of at least three, that enables error rate to be significantly reduced, and that above all is adaptable to sorting apparatuses already in use in businesses. Furthermore, the apparatus of the invention must be very easy to operate, being capable of being run by one or more operators, and it must be reasonable in cost. Also, the apparatus should be capable of being adapted simply and easily to the various sorting methods currently employed in businesses.
These objects are achieved by apparatus for providing assistance in manual sorting of articles of mail performed by one or more operators having at their disposition storage elements or pigeonholes corresponding to determined destinations, the articles of mail each including at least one document, and the apparatus comprising:
optoelectronic recognition means for scanning an article of mail or a document extracted from the article, and identifying thereon at least one data item suitable for giving direct or indirect information about the destination of the article;
comparator means for comparing said identified data item with a plurality of previously-stored predetermined data items;
allocation means for allocating a unique identity code to the recognized data item corresponding to a determined storage element allocated to a particular destination; and
contactless transmission means for transmitting said identity codes to all of the storage elements;
each of said storage elements being provided with display means mounted on removable fixing means and responding selectively to said identity code.
By this particular structure, the apparatus of the invention can be implemented without difficulty in any mail service in a business or a public authority. It suffices merely to use the removable fixing means to place the indicator means on existing pigeonholes or storage elements, without requiring a technician to provide any kind of cabling and without any need for the elements themselves to be replaced. The apparatus may have a single terminal capable of scanning both mail articles of any format and A4 documents, or it may be organized around a personal computer (PC) provided with a flat scanner for scanning A4 documents, with the terminal serving to scan articles of mail only. In either case, recognition can relate to OCR type characters or to hand-writing.
The invention thus makes it possible to eliminate the presorting step, and possibly also to refine sorting by reducing the number of subsequent steps.
Preferably, the said contactess transmission means include optoelectronic link means, e.g. operating in the infrared, or radio link means.
Advantageously, said indicator means comprise visual or audible indicator means having their own power supplies and in the form of at least one light indicator or display panel for displaying a number for processing a batch of articles of mail. Said display panel is organized so that it is capable of displaying a plurality of numbers in succession, each corresponding to a determined position of an article of mail in the batch being processed.
The power supplies of said indicator means are provided by photocells, inductive elements, or more simply by respective batteries that preferably have long lifetime, e.g. lithium cells. Advantageously, the removable fixing means may comprise clamp or clip type elements.